Ever since I can remember, my life has been determined by my dad's job. It's the reason my parents moved to Michigan in the 70s, passing down to me in their DNA an insatiable obsession with America and a longing to live there myself. It's the reason we moved all around the world while I was growing up, the reason I went away to boarding school six thousand miles from my family when I was eleven, and the reason we were transferred to Connecticut in the mid-90s, where I just happened to meet that boy I'm going to marry this fall.

You will be pleased to know that we made it to and from Monterey this weekend without incident. Well, if "without incident" means that I only drove down a one-way street the wrong way once. And also maybe kind of drove into a dead-end while getting on the freeway in the dark. Apart from those two little mistakes---quickly and easily corrected, both of them---my time behind the wheel was not as bad as I had thought it would be. Turns out driving a car is pretty much like riding a bike: you just remember how to do it, and after that, instinct kicks in.

So my mother told me that I wasn't allowed to write a special birthday-slash-father's-day post for my dad because it would make him sad and weepy, and then he'd have to close his office door and have a little cry, and that could get kind of embarrassing for him, because henceforth---I would imagine---no-one would ever take him seriously in meetings. And so I promised that I wouldn't.

Since I'm currently busy supporting the German economy through the purchasing of mass quantities of milk chocolate, my brother Luke---whose musical stylings you may remember from back here---has stepped up to the plate in my absence with an excellent guest post. Luke will be studying Politics and Sociology at Bristol University in September, where he will doubtless pick up a whole ton of chicks.

I wake up every morning like a deep sea diver coming up for air, shooting to the surface of wakefulness. Sleep has been deep and pitch-black and all-consuming---the grateful sleep of a person who finds, with a sudden relief, that there are more of her loved ones in close proximity than not in close proximity---but the room is always flooded with sunlight when I wake, the blind deliberately left open the night before to guarantee it.

My flight to Singapore was uneventful, or at least as uneventful as an eighteen hour flight can be. It was set to take off from San Francisco at 1am, so once I'd found my seat, I propped my head on my pillow and closed my eyes while waiting for the rest of the passengers to board. When I opened them what I thought was a few minutes later, I was disgruntled to see that people were still milling about in the aisles. "Can't they get organized?" I bristled to myself.

My brother Tom was in town this weekend, and we picked him up at the airport on Saturday morning---or, should I say, we tried to pick him up at the airport on Saturday morning but, um, we couldn't, BECAUSE HE WAS BEING HELD IN THE CUSTODY OF THE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY.

Every so often I think I've got nothing to post about, that I've come to the end of my material, that nothing is going on in my life that could warrant a mention on my website, and then all of a sudden, Brother Tom comes through for me like a firefighter with an oxygen mask, and sends me an email like this